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San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant Dismantling Will Cost $4.4 Billion, Take 20 Years
mdsolar writes with news about the closing of the San Onofre nuclear plant. Dismantling the San Onofre nuclear power plant in Southern California will take two decades and cost $4.4 billion. Southern California Edison on Friday released a road map that calls for decommissioning the twin-reactor plant and restoring the property over two decades, beginning in 2016. U-T San Diego says it could be the most expensive decommissioning in the 70-year history of the nuclear power industry. But Edison CEO Ted Craver says there's already enough money to pay for it. Edison shut down the plant in 2012 after extensive damage was found to tubes carrying radioactive water. It was closed for good last year.
For 2 units, plus a third already shut down one on the site, this is not too bad a cost. Considering the overall lifetime cost of the plant, including D&D, and even though it shut down early, on a cost per kwh basis, it is a good deal for emission free generation.
Unfortunately, many will look at the cost and not have a good perspective / basis for comparison.
Oh well... maybe they can reuse the land for those totally environmentally friendly solar panels. Wait, what do we do with those when they reach end of life? http://www.science20.com/scien...
Decommissioning costs are still a lot less than it would cost to build the plant now. Letting the plant cool down for a few years makes the process simpler and safer, though the reactor vessel is going to be a challenge.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
that's my neck of the woods. you don't see that on here every day. :-)
this is a big loss for the southern california community, because the powerplant looks like a pair of big b00bs! Hopefully they can still leave in place the containment structure.
naked gun: "everywhere I look something reminds me of her"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTxFFWajIII
Edison CEO Ted Craver says there's already enough money to pay for it, because Ted can declare bankruptcy on Southern California Edison, making the property a superfund site for taxpayers to pay for. SC Edison would then emege through chapter 11, restructure itself, and continue service in Southern California under another name. its precisely what Hooker Chemical Corporation did after the love canal disaster.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The first question that comes to my mind is how much would it cost to just fix the damn pipes?
Too cheap to meter
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I hope my math is correct: Taking numbers from wikipedia, considering only units 2 and 3: both were in operation for a bit more than 29 years and were producing about 1 GW at full power. Ignoring any production time lost for maintenance (my guess is they would run with a duty cycle of 80-90%), the total amount of produced kWh would be: 29 years * 365 days/year * 24 hours/day * 2 GW = 5e14 Wh = 5e11 kWh. The price for the decommissioning would thus come down to around 4.4e9 $ / 5e11 kWh = 0.0086 $/kWh, so let's round it up to 1 cent per kWh. Average price for electricity in the US seems to be around 0.10 $/kW, so the cost for the decommissioning seems acceptable, though not negligible.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
They're also stuck storing the fuel on site until the federal government comes up with a spent fuel storage solution.
Or until there is a 4th gen reactor available to consume the old waste as its fuel. The waste of a 4th gen is only dangerous for a few centuries rather than tens of thousands of years. In other words 4th gen converts a 10,000 year problem into a 300 year problem, while generating power from "fuel" that has already been mined, processed, and paid for.
The Danes got it right. Wind is free.
Wind and solar can't scale to the levels needed yet. Two or three more decades of R&D and engineering are needed. No matter how much you wish otherwise this will not change. Even Denmark with its enthusiasm and pretty good wind conditions expects another 10 years to go from 30% wind to 50% wind, and expect to be using of North Sea fossil fuels for another 40 years.
Your options for electricity in the near term will largely be nuclear or fossil fuels. The goods and services you consume will largely be produced using electricity from fossil fuels.
Don't be a science and economics denier. Solar and wind are not magic, science and engineering take time.
The spent fuel is going to just be sitting there. So, they won't really be finishing the job of decommissioning. The waste at Humboldt Bay is vulnerable to sea level rise so the story there is even less complete.
To add some perspective.... At current prices, $4.4B is about the value of 1.5 years worth of electricity generated by this plant.
some fucking idiotic nerd will defend the abomination that is nuclear power as great for the environment or some shit.
Yeah, like the environmental science nerds at NASA "... researchers estimate nuclear power has prevented more than 1.8 million deaths due to air pollution between 1971 and 2009. Given our fears, the findings are counterintuitive. But they're persuasive ..."
http://motherboard.vice.com/bl...
BTW, you do realize you are every bit the science denier as climate change deniers. Nuclear deniers are no different. They merely form their opinion based on left wing **politics** rather than right wing politics. Neither the climate deniers nor the nuclear deniers are based in science.
4th generation is much more expensive than once through and nuclear power is in decline so the wait will be forever. http://www.vox.com/2014/8/1/59...
If it is true that they have been setting aside funds to pay for decommissioning then it sounds like responsible management -- what a rarity. The cost sounds horrendous as does the time but I suspect this is just an issue of perspective. Hope it goes better than Hanford,,,
On the other hand it does make me wonder how much servicing and decommissioning are factored into the design of these things? I am still of the opinion that nuclear engineering is still in its infancy compared to making stuff with steel.
And one of the other posters did ask a good question -- what do we do with an old solar plant or wind farm? Just leaving it for the glaciers?
High levels of renewable energy integration are going on now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Owing to the high opportunity cost of nuclear power, it more likely interfered with preventing even more deaths. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-C...
-1
Seriously. Listen to the linked audio. Thorium or whatnot will be more difficult to obtain and maintain than Uranium - creating new classes of super-expensive "conflict minerals" - rapidly exhausting sources as expensive, horrible wars are fought.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Not better to repair it and keep using? We need power, and wind/solar is never going to cover it. If not that, dismantle it and build a new one in the same location.
San Onofre is being shut down due to intentionally obstructive Federal and California regulation. After the leaks were found in the new equipment, SCE was wrangling with the Japanese supplier (Mitsubishi) of the bad tubes and trying to put together the plan to replace them and bring the plant online, but CA anti-nuke activists, incluing the luddites at FOE lobbied Democrat Senator Boxer and the Obama administration to make it unworkable. SCE (who was paying large amounts of money every month for all their basic costs including the employees) could never get an answer from the federal regulators on WHEN their applications to re-start the plant would even be processed if they spent the money to replace the pipes (this was NOT normal). When you are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to operate a plant that is producing nothing, and government regulators keep delaying giving you a date when you will even be able to dream of using it IF you make it over the increasing number of hurdles politically-motivated people keep throwing up, at some point you "pull the plug" and cut your losses.
Nearly all the inflation in the costs of nuclear power has come from regulations and lawsuits. Had it not been for the Ralph Nader style of crusading legal actions designed to kill things (sue anybody making any technology they cannot prove is perfect... and let's not notice that nobody else, like lawyers, are being held to that standard) we would indeed have very cheap and plantiful electricity thanks, in large part, to nuclear power (which has been stuck with ancient tech for many decades because the regulatory/legal environment makes newer safer more-efficient designs uneconomical TO GET CERTIFIED)
We seriously need to re-think how we do nuclear power. The open source model is (likely) a far better, far cheaper way to go. What I mean is: right now we have heavy water reactors. They give off a lot of radiation. They are inherently dangerous. They are crazy expensive to build, and equally crazy expensive to de-commission. They also produce a lot of high-level waste. We need to think about smaller, safer, cheaper reactors. A small 200kW unit that goes into a neighbourhood for 20 years, and then gets pulled out and replaced. There are other benefits: you never get massive power outages. One plant goes down, and you get a 10 second blip on the nightly news about the 50 homes affected (part of one neighbourhood). A modern molten salt method would be far cheaper (no super-high pressure anything, no massive containment facility wanted or needed, you put it in, then remotely monitor it for 20 years, perhaps doing inspections twice a year but otherwise maintenance free). A lot of engineering has gone into the traditional plant, but more fundamental work (like the fundamental radioactive processes going on) should be done. What I'm talking about isn't like car manufacturers getting 5% more out of an internal combustion Otto cycle engine, I'm talking about using a Sterling cycle engine or even a fuel cell to provide power: that kind of a change.
Just WHERE in the hell do you morons THINK all that "green", "renewable", "free electricity" is coming from??? Every single one of those damnable windmills is slowing-down the air and making it more turbulent as a trade-off for spinning the generator (which is built using strip-mined rare-Earth minerals). Millions of those windmills all over the planet are having one hell of a lot of impact on the atmosphere and will increasingly do so as we add more and more of them. Anybody who supports this has no business complaining about ANYTHING related to weather and/or climate. As the weather changes in response to all this, the "greens" will keep blaming it all on CO2 - but these two things are BOTH involved (and the windmills have a direct impact on air circulation patterns and wind speeds). You simply cannot take that much energy out of a system without having an impact, though I'm certain the renewables activists will all be "deniers" on this.
Your math is rather simplistic... don't you agree?
You would come up with a better estimate if you found the average cost per khw over that 29 year period instead. I can tell you they weren't paying .10/kwh 29 years ago for sure.
Try again? :)
Really?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Why not just encase the whole thing in a giant block of concrete and let it be for the next 100,000 years?
They should put the funds to decommission a nuclear plant in escrow before it's even built and turned on.
...to put those big scary "$4.4 billion" numbers in there without context. It sounds like a lot of money (especially to people unfamiliar with the industry) but that number is the retail value of approximately 18 months of electrical generation for units 2 & 3 at San Onofre.
While the actual generation of nuclear power in the plant may not have emitted CO2 or other burn products, you can hardly call this emissions free. Don't forget that mining the uranium ore, transporting the uranium ore and some more steps in the production process is done with fossil fuels. Nuclear waste is also a form of emission. Even if it's not directly related to greenhouse effects, it will cause severe effects on humans and nature if not taken care of (in an expensive way). All things considered, nuclear may or may not be smarter to use than coal or even wind energy, it may emit a lot less greenhouse gasses, but I wouldn't want to claim it to be anywhere near emissions free.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Chernobyl was a completely different type of reactor from what was in the US and Chernobyl did not even have a containment building. Your claim of "fears of overcapacity" is an oft-cited one but conveniently you stripped it of its context: During the oil crunch when Jimmy Carter was telling Americans to wear sweaters and ride bicycles because his energy policies were so bad and he was so inept, there were not worries about too much power - the regulatory climate and the eco-lawsuits were spiralling out of control and Jane Fonda and friends had just scared the public with "The China Syndrome" so the "overcapacity fear" was in the context of "it may no longer be worth it to build these things - we'll have too much nuclear relative to the legal and regulatory risks"
The American nuclear power industry was essentially dead (not getting approvals to build new plants) LONG before Chernobyl (which you conveniently mask by saying TMI got permission to restart an old unit in 1985 - NOT to build and start a NEW UNIT).
Yes, because somehow spewing millions of tons of radioactive materials into the atmosphere is better for humanity than having nuclear reactors in place that do not pollute the atmosphere and cause cell mutation on a global level.
Can't you guys kiss and make up?
Oh wait, I mean, if only the government would get out of the way like it does in France, the market could give us nuclear power quickly and cheaply.
RTFA
Sorry, I didn't research exactly where this plant is located but if it is deemed to still be a safe location for a nuclear plant. We should simply build a new plant on the next door. Make it into one facility and make the license for the new plant to include securing and maintaining the old plant until it cools down enough to be easy to disassemble.
I can't think of any $4.4bn and 20 year timescale project that came in for less than $10bn.
4.4bn is just a starting number.
It's best to come in with at least the understanding that national electricity grids are large before coming into such a discussion and wasting so much time typing text based on a faulty premise.
Maybe I should explain what opportunity cost is here. Wind is less expensive than nuclear power. Because of atoms-for-peace, we pursued the more expensive energy source. But, that hit a train wreck as financing collapses in the 70's. Had we followed a more balanced course, we'd have greater carbon free generation from wind power than from nuclear power and health effects from coal would be reduced. So, we missed an opportunity by putting too much money into nuclear power. So, nuclear power has cost the lives that a more balanced approach could have saved.
Nader's sister, at least, opposes nuclear power because it is anti-Jeffersonian. It requires uninterrupted police powers to have a chance at remaining safe. Look how the failed state in Iraq has lost control of nuclear materials. Jefferson thought interruptions might be a requirement from time to time. Nader is better known for automobile safety, which has saved lives and money.
Well we all have our complaints. Everything I've seen shows wind unable to ever scale under current tech. The grid in America can't handle long distribution schemes total wind would require, even if that would work. But, either way, it takes more of a breakdown to battle through than I have time available right now.
We're seeing large wind contributions in parts of the country. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
And makes sense too. The cost in a reactor is mostly construction and decommissioning, with maintenance/operation being a somewhat distant third. There's not a lot of fuel costs. I mean heck, you look at new Navy reactors and they actually don't accept new fuel, the reactor lasts the life of the ship.
They cost a lot to build and a lot to tear down, but not a ton to operate. Of course those build and teardown costs have to be included in lifetime costs, like any fixed cost does in production.
If you were to break down power costs further, and separate out generation, transmission, and taxes, you'd probably find that construction and decommissioning were a decent bit of the generation costs, with operational costs and profit making up the rest.
As you pointed out: Just because those costs are a lot, doesn't mean it is an issue since the plant generates a lot of power. You see the same kind of thing with chip fabs. Intel's latest 14nm fabs cost them multiple billions to build. Well, that's fine, because they are going to use them to make and sell a lot of chips, so the per unit cost doesn't end up being that bad.
Apparently the shut-down is due to a problem on Mitsubishi's vapor generators, replaced in 2009/2010. Two years later, a leakage of 100+ liters per hour. Very impressive to buy heavy equipment with a two years lifetime ...
A continent is big and if it is calm in one place that does not mean it is calm everywhere. It is also colder in Alaska than Mexico. Different temperatures in different places result in different air pressures and air flows from high pressure to low - wind!
Inconvenient to your premise, but I had to point it out even though I don't give a shit about wind energy and am aware of it's many drawbacks. Making up drawbacks from nowhere however is a different story - I'd rather not have this place seen as a gathering of idiots due to people quoting stuff like your post and assuming we are all like that.
Line losses would be very low from nearby countries such as Denmark and Poland so if it's not windy in the little patch of Germany that has windmills how does that prove your point? Somewhere that's electrically almost in the same place is going to have some wind. Germany already trades electricity with France so why isn't French wind power on your little cherry picked graph if you want to prove your point?
Do you really think Germany was down 60GW of wind power at any one instant? Is there even that much wind capacity available at any time? That much of the German total generating capacity available of around 170GW is wind? I find it very difficult to believe so you'll need more than a postage stamp sized cherry picked graph to be convincing, especially after your "get wind from another continent" and similar bleatings of idiocy.
Just give up on this fantasy and use something real to push your point - it may not be as dramatic but you won't be making enemies of everyone that is not a full on nuclear zealot.
You may be more than 1/3 wind but that's the only thing here that is.
Obviously I meant the small coastal area where the windmills are sited. You cannot possibly be as stupid as you pretend so why try that tactic? Pretended stupidity may work in comedy but it's very annoying elsewhere.
Do you really think Germany was down 60GW of wind power at any one instant?
This is a graph of actual wind production figures in Germany at daily resolution for 2011. Even if you don't speak German, the three yellow lines in there represent: nameplate installed capacity (29.06 GW), average power (5.145 GW) and minimal power delivery at 99% confidence (0.918 GW), all at 1 day resolutions (the problems get much worse at finer resolutions). I'd call 1/30th of the install nameplate capacity pretty much zero. With larger installations on a country the scale of Germany (not a small country by any account) what will change is only the absolute values, but the relative proportions of them are going to stay mostly the same. Even if you take the average into account the average production as your goal, wind varies between days easily by 5x or more. Take for instance the troth in the middle of April (04) - that's nearly a week long drop to 1/5th the average output. Who's gonna jump in and pick up that effort? Also, look at the average power in relation to nameplate installed power, about a 4-5x relation. Germany requires 50-80 GW of constant production a day. So are they going to install 300 GW or more of nameplate wind capacity just to get the averages right? That'd be more than a doubling of their current installed capacity of 180 GW across all energy sources. Who's gonna pay for that? And who's gonna smooth the output and how much is that going to cost?(*)
So you see, I have done my homework and actually analyzed real data. Have you done yours?
(*) That same video shows a statistical calculation, taking real wind & solar production data from 2011, combining them and calculating the price of adding storage to the grid that would get around 4/7 of the average in reliable power. Results: ~100 billion Euros for 430 new pumped hydro plants (to replace 3-4 nuclear plants which would cost a fraction of that) or >250 billion Euros if battery storage were used. Keep in mind: these are based on actual combined wind & solar production curves, so you can't just dismiss them as being theoretical - this is based on actual data. You know, reality is that thing which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
How is that sixty?
Clearly not.
WTF is it with you armchair "one true energy" zealots? You seem to have got a lot worse in the decade since I was working in the electricity generating industry. Why is any lie justified as long as it pushes "the message"? Get back to fucking marketing or whatever you get up to and leave the solution of not having all your energy eggs in one basket to the engineers who have to deal with reality instead of making shit up.
To put it simply, the cost of fuel for a nuclear reactor is miniscule in the overall scheme of things. Coal, while costing less per ton, requires a LOT more fuel to produce the same amount of power.
Well, why is thorium a hard bargain then if fuel isn't a big deal? Yield. Money is spent on nuclear reactors in the buildout phase plus the monitoring/safety and maintenance of the plant, not the fuel. Using thorium doesn't significantly reduce these costs, but significantly reduces the power yield. You can only make reactors so big, and making more reactors cost more than making a higher yield reactor.
WTF?
I'm the one calling you out on your bullshit "there is no wind anywhere" rubbish and your "60GW of interconnect" lie. I've been too busy rubbing your face in your own filth and asking you to put up or stop lying to make any claims of my own.
Unit 1 - 77,342,040 MWh over its lifetime; Unit 2 - 244,640,520 MWh; Unit 3 - 238,412,160 MWh. All assuming 90% uptime. Works out to around $0.007/kWh just for decommissioning.
...not. Advocates of nuclear power point to the relatively-low (compared with other fuel types) operating cost of nuclear power plants but tend to disregard the construction and dismantling costs. In this case, the dismantling cost is estimated at $4.4 billion and that's before dismantling has even started. Worse, still, though was the little nugget in the article stating that the spent nuclear fuel would be indefinitely stored on the site in steel cannisters until the federal government comes up with a long term solution. Yeah, I know what you're thinking...'so what's the big deal about a little spent nuclear fuel in a few steel cannisters?' Well, those will require long-term expensive oversight and security and, even with all of that, will likely eventually begin releasing contamination into the environment as vigilence is relaxed due to future financial constraints, corrosion, etc. That spent nuclear fuel remains dangerous far after we, our descendants, their descendants, and their descendants are alive...and that amount of time is probably beyond the limit of any earthly vigilance anyway. Don't buy into the 'nuclear power is cheap and environmentally-friendly' arguments. It's not either one of those...and never will be (fission-based power anyway). Better to have coal-fired power plants. Even better to have wind and solar power. Better still to just use less.
Jobs for the boys eh? It is only the rediculously low levels of radiation exposure permitted that makes it all so expensive and time consuming. The Haliburtons of the world just love it. Trith is these installations could be scrapped in next to no time with no danger to workers if not for the conspired low radiation level restrictions. But that's business eh, just like the billion dollar scam to roof over Chernobyl, when a couple of feet of dirt would do the job just as well.
An advanced progressing society only needs sunshine, breezes, and dung for energy, and legalized marijuana to be comfortable in the cold dark tepee.